


Search and Rescue

by Scribe



Category: Big Eden (2000)
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 02:34:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5522231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The route to the airport is familiar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Search and Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Seascribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seascribe/gifts).



> Many thanks to Aria for the last-minute beta!

The route to the airport is familiar.

Henry's flown in and out a number of times over the years, but really he knows it because the two of them used to go joyriding here when Dean got his first car. He remembers the roads, the way the old Chevy used to rattle when Dean pushed it above seventy, remembers bracing a hand on the dashboard and laughing, remembers Dean whooping in delight and taking the turns a little too fast, but sometime in the last few months he's lost the ability to picture what Dean looked like in the seat next to him. He would've thought it was imprinted forever after so many years of turning it over in his mind, but it's overwritten now with Dean the adult, quiet and a little tired-looking behind the wheel.

The silence in the car is a little awkward. They never finished the fight Dean had walked out of at Thanksgiving, though it's been on Henry's mind. He's been hiding behind the way that Sam's death makes it rude for Dean to raise the subject, but now, suddenly, he wants the closure he kept telling Mary Margaret he was getting.

"Hey, Dean," he says.

"Mm?" Dean tilts his head a little but keeps his eyes on the road. He's a better driver these days. Maybe it's having kids, or maybe just growing up.

"You still mad at me?" Henry asks.

"Yeah." Dean shrugs a little. "I meant what I said, though, about you being family. That's what you do for family, drive them to the airport even though you're angry."

It's more or less the answer he expected, but it still stings a little. 

"Thanks," he says, swallowing it down. "And I'm sorry, for what it's worth. You're my family too."

"Good," says Dean, with a quick glance over at him, and that seems to be the end of that.

Dean's first car, the one they used to drive to the airport and back just because it was the best straight stretch of road around, was a gunmetal gray pickup. He'd bought it cheap off one of his dad's friends and loved it dearly for just under a year before a deer jumped into it from out of nowhere on the highway one night. The deer had been killed, the car totaled; Dean had walked away unharmed but visibly shaken and Henry hadn't slept all night for wanting desperately to hold him. He'd known for sure after that, about himself and about Dean.

That night was half a lifetime ago. He isn't proud of the way he's dealt with it since.

"I got divorced," Dean says suddenly, interrupting his thoughts.

"What?"

"I got divorced, Henry. The woman I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life with decided she was done with me, and with our _kids_ , and I had to come back here because I couldn't handle it on my own. I had a good job in the city, you know, the boys were in school, and I just couldn't do it, trying to keep us all going when I couldn't even explain why Mom didn't live with us anymore."

"Dean-"

"I could have used my best friend, is what I'm saying. I kept waiting and waiting for you to call, thinking this has gotta be important enough, right? I knew you must have heard. Nothing stays secret for long in Big Eden."

"I didn't. I had no idea until I got back here, I swear." 

That cuts through Dean's momentum. "Really?" he says, glancing over with a frown.

"Cross my heart."

Henry never called home as often as he should have, but he hadn't been completely out of contact. Sam had to have known- Dean was right about the Big Eden gossip mill- but he'd never mentioned a word about the divorce to Henry. He wondered which of the three of them Sam had been protecting with that. He'd never know, now. 

"Why didn't you call me?" he asked.

"Didn't have your number."

"You could've gotten it."

"Yeah, I know. It just seemed...it was a bad couple of months, okay? And then there's you, you went off to college, you got a damn scholarship to art school, and you move to New York and started making a living selling paintings. Even I know that's practically impossible. You're headlining in galleries in New York, and what did I ever do? The one thing I had to say for myself, the one thing, was that I'd made this family, and then it turned out that even that was a lie."

It's bizarre to think about it like that after years of being a little bit convinced, deep down, that he just wasn't good enough for Dean. Henry keeps that thought to himself.

"Your family isn't a lie," he says firmly. "Maybe your marriage didn't turn out like you hoped, but the boys adore you, anyone can see that."

"Thanks," says Dean, shooting him a quick, heartfelt smile.

"And I'm sorry it turned out the way it did. I would have called if I'd known."

That's probably true, he thinks, remembering the queasy knot of hope that had formed in his chest when Grace told him the news. He wouldn't have been calling for the right reasons. It was probably better that he hadn't known.

"All right," says Dean. "But no disappearing this time. If you don't call I'll sic Mary Margaret on you, I have her number too now."

"It's a deal," promises Henry.

They lapse into silence again for the rest of the drive, but it feels more comfortable now. Henry steals sips of Dean's coffee from the cup holder and looks out the window. He'll miss the mountains when he's back in New York. He always has.

They get to the airport with time to spare, and Dean kills the engine and gets out. Henry takes a minute wrestling his bag out of the footwell, and by the time he gets around to the back of the car Dean is leaning against the trunk, keeping him from getting to the rest of his things. He's looking steadily at Henry. The weight of his regard feels almost startling now that he's not watching the road. 

"Why are you going? For real," he asks. Henry sighs.

"I keep telling people this. It's not a secret. I came here for Sam, and Sam isn't here anymore, so I'm going back."

Dean gives him a sad smile. "Sam's not in New York, either."

"No, but he never was. New York doesn't have a Sam-shaped hole in it." He barely makes it to the end of the sentence. Sometimes Sam's death feels as far off as his grandmother's, and he keeps thinking he's all cried out. He keeps being wrong.

"Oh, Henry," says Dean, pushing off the car to wrap him in a hug. Henry hides his face in Dean's shoulder and tries to breathe through it, but the tears come anyway, there in the middle of the airport parking lot with Dean's big hands rubbing soothingly over his back and the nape of his neck. 

They stay there for a while, even when Henry's gotten himself under control. He feels utterly drained, like lifting his head from Dean's shoulder would take more strength than he has left. Dean isn't in any hurry to let him go. He's always liked touching Henry, a kind of casual possessiveness that had kept too many hopes alive for too many years. Now that Henry isn't overanalyzing everything, he thinks it's probably just how Dean communicates best. He might like it more, actually, for that realization.

Eventually he makes himself pull away, leaning against the car next to Dean and scrubbing at his eyes. Crying always leaves him feeling hollow and tired afterward. 

"Sam's not the only reason you stayed, though, right?" says Dean after a minute. He's looking out at the runway, hands jammed into his pockets. Henry's left a wet patch on his sweater. "What about Pike?"

"Really? You were in on it too?"

That makes Dean look at him, frowning. "In on what?"

"The cooking thing. Oh, never mind," he says, when Dean continues to look confused. "What about Pike? I tried to find him before I left. He's not even speaking to me."

"I'm sure moving back to New York will solve that problem."

"Dean-"

"Is he in love with you?" There's something odd in his tone, almost accusatory. Henry thinks about it anyway. He wonders how many meals Pike made for them, how many nights he went home to eat by himself instead of staying. Nobody's said it in quite so many words, but-

"Yeah. He probably is."

"And do you love him?"

"I barely know the guy!"

"Could you love him? Someday?" Dean presses. 

Henry hadn't been lying when he said he didn't know Pike. He wishes he could go back and watch their interactions over the last year again, from the outside, knowing to look for- what, for shyness? Hope?- instead of the dislike he thought he'd seen for so many months. It had seemed impossible to have a conversation with Pike, but in retrospect the few times they'd actually talked had been surprisingly easy. Henry had wanted to make him happy, with the painting of the Pleiades. He wasn't quite expecting the way that Pike's slow smile made something flip in the pit of his stomach, but maybe he should have been. Maybe he should have paid more attention.

He has to steel himself before he can swallow and say, "I think so."

Dean nods. "You have anyone in New York you think you could love?"

"What does it matter? Pike doesn't want anything to do with me, anyway."

"From what I saw, I'm pretty sure he wants everything to do with you."

"What you saw?" asks Henry. Dean shrugs, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets.

"Just, you know. The way he looks at you, I guess."

"And how's that?"

Dean pauses for a moment, struggling for words, and comes up with: "the way I couldn't." Then he winces and holds up a hand to stop Henry from saying anything. "I know, I’m sorry. I'm supposed to stop saying that. And I shouldn't have tried to force it, that wasn't fair to you."

"It was kind of flattering, I guess," says Henry, trying for wry and offhand. He thinks he almost makes it. He's had a while to put Thanksgiving behind him, now, to put the fantasy of Dean behind him. He can see a little humor in it; no other straight guy has ever pursued him that hard. 

"More like selfish," says Dean. "I just- I would be everything for you, if I could, you know? I thought maybe if I tried I could be...enough. But I get it, I do, you deserve somebody who wants, uh. You know."

Henry winces and rescues him from floundering before this gets any more awkward than it already is.

"Somebody who isn't straight?"

"Yeah," says Dean. "I don't...I want you to be happy, and if I can't make you happy you should have Pike, or someone else, whatever it'll take. I just wish you could find it here."

"I'll stay in touch," Henry promises again, though it feels inadequate. 

"You'd better," says Dean. He pauses, and then adds, "You should call Pike, too. You're gonna break his heart, getting on that plane."

"I don't want to talk about Pike," says Henry. He doesn't know how to reconcile any of it, what he knows now with the way that Pike closed the whole store for days rather than talk to him, the steady, quiet presence that he'd clung to on the night that Sam died and how Pike had disappeared afterward. He's not sure he has the right to feel betrayed. Pike never promised him anything; Henry never had a reason to expect that he could rely on him, but for some reason it still left him reeling when Pike wasn't there to lean on. 

The reason isn't actually that hard to figure out.

Henry checks his watch; he should really get his luggage and go inside, but he can't bring himself to do it just yet. New York doesn't have anything like this, the chill morning air and the long tree shadows over the quiet parking lot, Dean leaning silently against the car next to him. People in New York don't know how to be silent. Henry isn't good at it, either, when he's there.

"Can I talk to the boys, if I call when they're out of school?" he asks, to change the subject.

"You'd be better off asking them," says Dean. "Ben will run for the phone, I bet, but Andrew knows how to hold a grudge. He must have gotten that from Wendy."

"He sure didn't get it from you." Dean tips his head, acknowledging the truth of that. He's always been the most affable person Henry knows; maybe he's just too likeable to get any practice at grudges.

"He'll come around, probably," Dean says. "You gotta give him some time. He's just a kid, he doesn't get that these things are complicated. He just knows that his mom left, no warning at all, and then I move him up here and you show up and you're always around, you know, teaching him card games and helping with homework and reading bedtime stories and all that, and just when it starts feeling like he has a family again, then out of nowhere you're going too. I'm not gonna tell him not to be mad about it. I'd rather he never spoke to you again than have him decide that it's his fault, that the people he loves keep leaving because he's not good enough for them."

"Dean," says Henry, at a loss. He's not entirely sure they're talking about Andrew anymore. "I don't- that's not why I'm going."

Dean blows out a long breath and slouches back down against the car. The sun finds its way through a break in the trees at the edge of the lot, making Henry squint; Dean holds a hand up to shade his eyes rather than turn and actually look at him.

"You got family in New York?" Dean asks quietly. "Not relatives. Family." 

Henry wants to protest that he doesn't know what Dean's talking about, but it would be a lie, and Dean's right. Henry doesn't have any family in New York.

What New York has, the thing that's always drawn him, is possibility. New York has too many people to ever meet—some of them must be amazing. Somewhere out there in the crowd is someone who might love his paintings more than anything in the world, if they happened to walk in the right door at the right time to see them. Somewhere out there is someone who might love _him_ more than anything in the world. In New York there's always something to experience, somewhere unique to go, something new and fascinating to do. 

It is, oddly, a good place to tread water. In New York it's easy to be sad, or lonely, or bored, because there's every chance that tomorrow that special someone will walk in that door, that something fantastic will happen to you. It's a good place to wait for fate to step in. Big Eden is too small for fate. All the possibilities and all the people are laid out plain to see. If you want something fantastic in Big Eden, you have to make it yourself, start to finish.

You have to buy a recipe book, Henry supposes, and open it at page one.

"I know Sam's gone," says Dean, "and if it's too hard to be here without him, that's okay. That's how it is, sometimes. I just want to make sure you know that he wasn't all the family you had here."

"Yeah," says Henry. "Yeah. I know."

The thing about New York is that he doesn't ever take advantage of all the possibility. He takes fliers and jots down exciting events in his calendar and rarely gets out to go to them; he tries his best to dodge nearly every blind date Mary Margaret sets up for him. He always tells himself that he'll do better tomorrow, or next week, or next month when he isn't so busy or tired or stressed about this opening or that commission. He never does.

Henry shades his eyes and looks out past the trees and the runway, toward the foothills of the Purcell Mountains. He left the house half-packed. Somewhere there, waiting with the rest of the memories he couldn't quite face, is a box of his old notebooks, sketches of Sam and his grandmother and Dean scattered in among an endless parade of mountain vistas. He hasn't painted mountains since college, not ashamed of his roots, exactly, but eager to prove his versatility and more fascinated with every new thing he learned, with the afterimages of the city lingering behind his eyelids at night. 

He thinks it might be time to try mountains again. 

When he looks back over Dean is watching him, the sunlight casting his face in sharp angles. He isn't hard to read; Henry once knew him better than anyone on this earth, and anyway Dean has probably never hidden an emotion in his life. He's just waiting, now. He's said his piece and he's waiting to see what Henry's going to do. The two of them have spent a lot of time waiting on each other, in one way or another. 

Henry pushes himself up, slinging his bag over his shoulder, and holds out his hand for Dean's keys. 

"All right," he says, "All right. You gonna let me drive on the way home, or what?"


End file.
